The Sun ain't gonna shine on OpenOffice any more

The takeover of Sun by Oracle should concentrate our minds on what open-source software means. Here's a hint: it doesn't mean software that users can fix. Nor does it mean software that your money gives someone else an incentive to fix. It means software that is maintained for the benefit of large corporations. Everyone who has cheerfully been using OpenOffice for the past seven or eight years must face the prospect that the new owners will drop the project. As it's open source, this is easily accomplished by "releasing it into the community", which will make it reliant on Novell and IBM, the only other companies to put significant numbers of programmers into the work.

Software companies want hardware to be free, or as cheap and interchangeable a commodity as possible, whereas hardware companies want software to be the cheap and interchangeable part of the equation. So it would have been better for OpenOffice to have been bought by IBM. But IBM blocked a deal for Oracle to buy the only three bits of Sun's software that it actually wanted - Java, Solaris, and MySQL. So Oracle had to buy the whole company. But that's bad news for the bits that it doesn't want and can't make money from.

Well, I quite like OpenOffice, for all my bitching about it. I have written my past three books in it, and by now have a set of macros and customisations that do almost everything I could want when writing radio scripts or blogposts, as well as the wonderful Zotero, a Firefox extension, which integrates with OpenOffice to do scholarly bibliographies, and can pull in references from all over the place. But I have never believed it was a "community project" in any real sense. Building software is skilled, full-time work, and the people who just use it can't keep it working.

So the millions of people who use OpenOffice are utterly dependent on large corporations who hope to use it to damage Microsoft; what worries me is that Google no longer sees Open

Office as a useful weapon. Google now has its own set of office applications in the cloud. That's why there has been no one accepted to work this year on OpenOffice for Google's Summer of Code, which picks out talented student programmers and lets them show what they can do on open-source projects. The system benefits everyone - except the project not chosen - and there is no equivalent from any of the companies that sponsor OpenOffice now.

As a writer, I don't find Google Docs very convenient. It has far less power and flexibility than a proper word processor. But it does collaborate. It makes it easy to share documents, and that matters more inside an organisation than what any individual can do with the documents shared: the majority of users never try to improve in any way on the most obvious things their software can do. But Google Docs, though free to use, is not a benevolent operation. That may be why it works so well.

For an example of benevolence without professionalism, look no further than Ubuntu Linux. This has a reputation as the most professional of the end-user distributions, in the sense that it is the one backed by the most money, and the one with the clearest focus on being usable by people who don't care about computers.

But when I upgraded to the latest version, I found two things: half the sounds had stopped working, and there are no resources online or elsewhere that actually help when this happens. There is an immense amount of verbiage on the matter - a thousand-post thread in the official forums, for example. But it consists almost entirely of people posting problems and one man trying, and usually failing, to answer them. For support from the community to work better than care in the community there has to be a fairly narrow spread of expertise among users, so the problems make sense to the people who may solve them. Once that stops being true, you must be prepared to spend millions of dollars, as Sun did over the years, on professional developers who carefully document what works and what doesn't.

I can't see Oracle keeping up this tradition - not unless it decides that OpenOffice is a way to make money, or to damage rivals. And why should either of those things be true?